whereby the poem as an intellectualized product has its artificial stimuli.^38
The renowned prose writer of Basrah and Baghdad, ‘AmrnIbn ‘Uthmmn al-
Jm.iz(d. 255 H/868 AD), was straightforward in associating poems addressed
to kings, leaders, and notables for profit and repayment with rigorous embel-
lishment and improvization and craft.^39 To apply Lukács’ terms, we may say
that the Caliphal period witnessed the transposition of art from ritual and
spontaneity to an established status of technical artificiality held in suspense
between business and “convulsive retreat,” in respect to artists.^40 Apart from
the commodity transactionand the innovative stance in the poetry of the
moderns, al-mu.dathnn, their extensive use of figurative language^41 has to
be looked at also as a sign of transgression, a progressive move forward, for
the artist-poet exerts enough energy and thinking to come up with an artistic
creation in which he/she “...lives...activity as a technician,” writes Jameson
in a lucid paraphrase of Walter Benjamin.^42
The modernist critical effort was neither systematic, then, nor was it
necessarily coherent. It had the passion and zeal of opposition and revolt. The
female pioneer of the Free Verse Movement, Nmzik al-Malm’ikah, edited the
influential “Minbar al-naqd” (critical platform) in Al-Mdmbjournal in 1953,
where heated discussions of modernist poetics took place. Throughout the
1950s and 1960s Al-Mdmbwas the most influential literary platform with
a readership that reached every corner in the Arab world. While there was
enough recognition of the Free Verse Movement, the focus in Nmzik al-
Malm’ikah’s critical platform was on the technical shift in poetry writing,
a shift for which Nmzik al-Malm’ikah spent time and effort to pattern, contain,
and redraw as an innovative stance within a classical poetic tradition.^43 She
was opposed to those, especially JabrmI. Jabrm, who began to speak of the
Movement as a discontinuity, and who were also carried away by their attach-
ment to English and French experimentation.^44 Both sides of the Movement,
the radical and the conciliatory, deserve attention, as they would soon con-
solidate the modernist and the postmodernist drives in Arabic poetry. To
accommodate and appropriate the new genre, writers were also preoccupied
with relations to tradition, the classical ode, Western poetry, and the emer-
gence of the prose poem as a technical innovation. There was even a contro-
versy in respect to who was the initiator of the Free Verse Movement.
Important as these issues were to a burgeoning endeavor, they detracted
attention from the cultural dynamic of change. The effort hindered itself at
this stage from further delving not only into continuity as a cultural fact, but
also into poetic genealogies, issues of prosification, use of Qur’mnic styles and
other poetic discourse. These issues were as real then in the poetic practice
itself as they were in Arab life and culture. The modernist drive in the late 1940s
to implicate the poetic into common life beyond the nineteenth-century
revivalist rhetorical grandeur was part of a broad social and political
consciousness, but critics and poets were so prompted and overwhelmed by
immediacy that they abandoned the need for a thorough critique to account
POETIC TRAJECTORIES: CRITICAL INTRODUCTION